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“It’s only winterbite,” my gardener friend assured me, handing me several mottled leaves from the Christmas Hollys we’d planted last spring in my side yard. Her windblown cheeks, her bulky sweatshirts and jeans, smudged from previous work, bespoke her authority tending gardens. She brightened and leaned over. “See these buds beneath other stressed leaves? Once the earth warms up, they’ll push them off and form new leaves.”

Like the Christmas Hollys, I, too, suffer from winterbite. So weary of wearing long underwear and multiple layers of heavy clothing, so bone-chilled by arctic winds, so leery of inaccurate weather forecasts, so sun-deprived, so tired of in-house walks.

Like everyone, I yearn for the warming sun to quicken my own budding with spring’s pastels: pinks, raspberry, peach, rose …

Like this:

It happened again. No, not another school shooting—Something more profound, despite months of near-drought hardening the soil, intent upon imprisoning the emergence of all growth.

There was a reprieve. Days of dripping rain began juicing the soil and softening thirsty fissures. Faint hues of green patchworked lawns. Buds swelled, enhancing the tips of shrubs and trees. Even more wetness penetrated parched roots of bulbs planted in late autumn. Indeed, this quickening would not be stopped.

And today’s sunshine has energized the solitary gold crocus blooming in my flowerbed, one that I had not planted, and one that has given wiggle-room to my spirit for many springs.

Such is our hope in the greening Power that restores life, within and without. With the winter’s bluster waning, let us give thanks …